Monday, March 30, 2015

How Old is Old? – Part V

Continuing with and completing
the understanding of radiocarbon dating (Carbon-14), and the time clock Willard
F. Libby invented to read the ages of the past used constantly by
archaeologists and anthropologists in determining the age of past civilizations
and their accomplishments, both in the Americas and elsewhere. When I was young and an aspiring
world conqueror, there was an unarguable and all inclusive tenet or canon in
science that, simply stated, was “First
you create a hypothesis, then you set about to prove it wrong—if you cannot
prove it wrong, it therefore must be right, but only after you have exhausted
all possible proofs that it is not wrong!”

As stated by Sir Karl Raimund
Popper (left), who promoted this belief and spoke out against empirical
falsification, there were three steps in developing any new idea: 1)
Formulate a hypothesis, 2) Try to prove it wrong, and, 3) Based upon your
results, formulate a new hypothesis. It was an almost never-ending process of
making certain that your hypothesis was, indeed accurate. Generally regarded as one of the
greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper was
once asked “Why not try to prove your
hypothesis right?” His answer, “Because
you can't; you never know if there isn't one more experiment that will prove it
wrong.” As a trivial example,
let's say your hypothesis is that all the balls in a can are white. You pull
one out and it is white. Have you proved your hypothesis? No, you just have not
disproved it. However, if you pull out a pink ball, you do know your hypothesis
is wrong. Of course, you can take all the balls out of the can but you can't do
all the possible experiments on a scientific topic. This is called the “method
of falsification.” It is like saying: “Every
swan I’ve seen is white, therefore, all swans are white.”Simply stated, a
theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, consequently,
it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. Popper’s well-accepted
scientific canon was that If the outcome
of an experiment contradicts the theory, one should refrain from ad hoc
maneuvers that evade the contradiction merely by making it less falsifiable.
This was a concept in science that bound all scientists and their ideas into
the realm of honest endeavors and results. Constantly fighting against
scientists who championed pet theories, despite the results, Popper stated in
1957: “If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look
for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see,
whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.”

Popper, considered
the most important philosopher of science since Francis Bacon of the 16th
century, is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with
critical rationalism, "the first non-justificational philosophy of
criticism in the history of philosophy.” In a nutshell, Critical
rationalists hold that scientific theories and any other claims to knowledge
can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical content)
can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them. His ideas, which he
formulated as early as 1938, was considered the most generally accepted and
practiced scientific method known. However, today, his method has long been
scrapped in favor of proving yourself right since that is to whom lucrative
contracts, funding, computer time, and grants are given.

It seems
unquestionable that Popper, who said, “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only
possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory
nor the problem which it was intended to solve,” would not have approved of Libby’s
sweeping his experiments that proved his hypothesis wrong under the rug in
favor of “everyone knows the earth is
millions of years old.”It was also Popper
who wrote a ground-breaking work entitled The
Open Society and its Enemies, a remarkable insight into humanities many
mistakes in the name of progress and science. As Popper states about his
philosophy, “It springs from my conviction that, if our civilization is to
survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may
make great mistakes—some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the
perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged,
continues to mislead those on whose defense civilization depends, and to divide
them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes
ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a
part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may
help to destroy it all.”Evidently, Libby had
not heard of Popper’s philosophy and numerous statements in support of it that
had been the standard principle for scientific evaluation of ideas throughout
most of the 20th century, since
he ignored his tests that disproved his theory, and reset his radiocarbon
dating clock to read it the way he thought it should be read. Thus, we see a
world today labeled 4.55 billion years old, rather than the 10,000-year-old
earth that his experiments actually showed the world to be.Nor, evidently, did Popper see far enough into the future to realize how
indifferent science would become toward “truth,” for he also wrote: “Those among us who are unwilling to expose
their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.”
Libby not only was unwilling to expose his ideas to the hazard of refutation by
publishing and standing beside his own tests results, but changed them to match
a belief held by a small segment of science at the time (1950) that the Earth
was millions of years old—thus, not only taking part in the scientific game,
but steering it down a side road that at the time was not widely accepted to
make it the standard of belief throughout almost all of society.

Thus, in my lifetime, I have seen a drastic swing from trying to prove a
hypothesis wrong, to trying to prove it right, no matter what. For this latter
act, Libby won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1960, and the world ever since has
seen evolution as the means of the earth’s existence, and man as living upon it
for millions of years.However, in so doing, Libby proved another of Popper’s sayings to be
quite accurate: “If we are uncritical we
shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and
we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet
theories.”It is interesting that Libby’s own experiments and results would have
opened the door to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time—that
the Earth’s existence matches that listed in Moses’ writings and verified the
age of the Earth as the ancients knew it and as God intended us to know.
Instead, he violated the very public trust he hoped to have gained and fostered
on mankind a lie about radiocarbon dating that has led to a misunderstanding of
ancient ages in all archaeology and anthropology studies ever conducted, now
going on and will ever be held.Thus, it should be obvious from
all this, that the idea and results of radiocarbon dating of ancient sites can
tell us only one thing—not the calendar date of their existence, but that one is older
than the other. Stated differently, we can learn from Carbon-14 dating that Andean
Peru was settled long before Mesoamerica, but other than that, we cannot tell
exactly when, or even in what century. As long as science continues to use an
atmosphere in equilibrium that is actually not equalized, we will never know from radiocarbon dating (or any other dating method) in what time period prehistoric events of the past took place.